Sulejman Bijedic

Biography:
Sulejman Bijedić (b. 1988) is a documentary photographer born in Bosnia and Herzegovina. He lives in Italy, where he came as a child when his family fled the conflict in Bosnia in 1993. His interests focus mainly on how habits and culture define...
read on

During the military occupation of Počitelj, most of the houses and cultivated fields were burned. The whole area was intentionally populated with snakes, so that the original population's return was quite impossible.

The suburbs of the village are full of 'gomile', stone piles high up to five meters. Ancient legends tells that they cover the bodies of Greek soldiers that died because of the plague during the Ottoman wars.

Zulfo, currently the eldest of the village, is the guardian of endless stories and anecdotes about the origins and people of the village. He knows by heart the family tree of the few families that have lived on this land for centuries.

Fata is slowly getting blind. She spends most of her day in front of the window light. When I ask her to tell me about the war she says she does not remember anything about those terrible days, but we both know that it is not the truth.

One can count on one hand the children left in the village. Many don’t want to work the land as the tradition dictates but the education costs are very high for their families, so their future is uncertain.

On Fridays, the day of prayer, the village seems to be in festivity and the mosque fills with worshippers. The Imam is a point of reference for the community and its sermons always encourage peaceful coexistence with neighbors from different ethnicities.

Zulfo, despite his age, spends most of the day working alone in the fields where he spent his childhood. He often tells me how beautiful it was to grow up in a village full of people and surrounded by nature.

During the days of the deportations to concentration camps, many of the men and boys of the village used the woods as a hideout. Some of them remained hidden for months before being able to find an escape route.

Počitelj, "the city of stone" - as named by the Yugoslav writer Ivo Andrić - is a small village in Herzegovina located just close by the Neretva River.

During the 90's war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the HVO armed groups forced its inhabitants to flee their homes, committing a real ethnic cleansing with systematic killings and deportations to concentration camps.

Twenty years after the end of those atrocities, only a small fraction of the population came back to live in Počitelj and to devote themselves again to what has always been their main source of subsistence: the land.

“Odavle samo u harem“ - which literally means "From here only to the cemetery” - will be the testimony of the ancestral bond between the village and those who belong to it, the sons and daughters of Počitelj.